Yeah Jeff, Well done and thanks for your efforts with the Mexico concerts.
I am left scratching my head about karma however. By enabling the ability for people to be praised anonymously you also enabled the ability for people to be criticised anonymously. If we are to care about a high karma level, we must also care about a negative karma level.
I used to have a karma of 1. I got that after posting what I thought was a useful post on a topic, so I think I know why I got it. Just lately my 1 point of karma went away. I can conclude that someone read one of my posts and for some reason decided that I deserved to loose that point. I don't know who it was, what I said, or what about it they didn't like or disagreed with. For all I know it could have been some completely random act. If it was any one of you reading this, that's ok, I'm not personaly upset, nor am I fishing for more karma - my situation is not what this is about, but is used by way of example.
So, what am I and others in this situation supposed to do about this? I could choose to ignore karma. I could choose to try for a large negative karma to prove how little I care about it. I could choose to no longer visit this site. I could choose to antagonize over every post I have ever made since joining to work out if there was something there that someone could have been upset over. I could reduce my future posting to only posts that I have thouroughly analysed to ensure there is no chance of getting bad karma from them. I could ensure that I don't post anything that might encourage debate, as that might get me smited. I could sit in a dark room with a bottle of red wine listening to Faith turned up loud and ponder all the bad things I've done.
It's just to me the message seems to be, be happy when you get karma, don't worry about it when you loose karma. That's a way of thinking that is not going to be default for a lot of people, and we may find we end upseting more people by having it around.
The other thing that karma will do is remove the need to analyse a lively debate to work out which side to take. If I see a thread with J (karma +30) debating with Brent (karma -10) I don't need to actually read the posts. I could quickly add to the thread "Right on J!. Get a life Brent!" and never know what it is about (and I may even get karma for that post). For all I know, J could have been angry and overly harsh, while Brent could have been struggling to communicate effectively and get the valid parts of his point of view across.
I think we can all say well done to Jeff for his efforts, and many of us have in actual posts. We don't need karma to do this.
David, thanks for running a great site. Please don't let it turn into a popularity contest that scares new members away when they loose a point of karma, as they usually will, whilst finding their feet here.
